A Few Rules for Predicting the Future by Octavia E. Butler
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A Few Rules for Predicting the Future by Octavia E. Butler
“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”
Steven Johnson • Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most
Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future’s unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond whic
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Why are these kinds of stories so hard to sustain, so often subsumed by negative and dystopian visions when the fact is, nobody can predict the future. Assuming dystopias has an element of self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s also unlikely things will unfold exactly as anyone predicts.
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To move past the dark shadows of existential threats such as COVID-19, climate crises, and economic inequality, futurists must embrace an obligation to insist that things can get better.